Q&A: Organizer Discusses 'Take Our Daughters to Work' Campaign

On April 28, the Ms. Foundation is hoping that thousands of girls
across the nation will not go to school.

Instead, the New York-based foundation is encouraging them to spend
the day learning about the world of careers at the workplaces of
parents or other adults through its "Take Our Daughters to Work''
campaign. The program is co-chaired by the singer Jessye Norman, the
writer Gloria Steinem, and Joyce Dinkins, the wife of Mayor David
Dinkins of New York City.

Idelisse MalavÀe, the vice president of the Ms. Foundation,
spoke with Staff Writer Meg Sommerfeld about the project.

Q.
How did the program get started?

A.
The program initiated in the National Girls Initiative, [which was]
launched in 1991 ... to interrupt what we were learning had become the
normal track of girls' development--that as girls approached
adolescence they suffered some kind of significant loss.

For white girls, that loss was usually a loss of voice and
self-confidence or self-esteem ... [and in] their comfort in their own
bodies. For African-American girls, [it] was more associated with their
connections with outside institutions, the most important being school.
...

For Latina girls, it was a combination of both. They suffered
significant drops in self-esteem, and they had very high dropout rates,
so they really ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Carol Gilligan, the Harvard researcher, talks about it as "hitting
the wall of Western culture.'' Instead of being feisty and mouthing
off, they will learn to be nice, they learn to be the perfect girl who
never hurts anybody's feelings, who never gets angry, who's always very
solicitous, always very thoughtful.

With this quietness, this niceness, this kind of demure quality,
girls continue to become more and more invisible in our society. Our
purpose was to make girls visible, valued, and heard.

Q.
What are your general goals?

A.
This is a public-education campaign. We don't expect that spending one
day with a mother or father or family friend or some organized activity
by a school is going to change a girl's life. But we do hope that it
may have some small impact ... and that it may help to raise
aspirations.

Q.
How old are the participants?

A.
The age range is 9 through 15. ... We're focusing on preadolescence and
early adolescence because of its crucial nature in girls'
development.

Nine-year-old girls are among the most sophisticated observers of
human behavior you ever want to meet. They're enormously perceptive
about relationships.They'll talk about the importance of getting angry
and saying what you mean, and working through [conflicts].

As we grow older, we lose that. To too large an extent, you find
that the problems that take root in adolescence are the problems that
women face in life: depression, higher rates of suicide and suicide
attempts, eating disorders--90 percent of anorexics are young girls. I
mean, you name a bad thing, and it's very much associated.

Violence escalates as girls enter pre-adolescence, at 9 or 10. When
they are starting to look more like women, they are more subject to
physical and sexual violence. This is the stuff of adult women's lives,
and this is when it begins.

Q.
What will happen on April 28 itself?

A.
As much as possible, [girls] will be assigned to "shadow'' different
workers for the day. Part of what the curriculum does is assist girls
in learning interviewing skills, how to ask questions.

There are going to be group activities where they'll have an
opportunity to get a sense of how all these pieces fit together to
produce whatever the company produces or the service that they
provide.

We are encouraging [workplaces] to have whoever their chief
operating officer is spend a good amount of time talking with the girls
in a group meeting and be available to hear what girls have to say.

Q.
Have any educators raised concerns that you might be sending out a
negative message by encouraging girls to skip school for a day?

A.
One of the things here in New York that there's been a real emphasis
from the board of education on is that education doesn't take place
just in the school classroom and the importance of exposure to the work
world is enormously important and enormously educational.

Q.
What long-term impact will this have?

A.
The long-term impact I think it will have is increased awareness of
what happens to girls [during adolescence] and to begin focusing on
contradicting that and interrupting that cycle.

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